Android Emulator

Android Emulator is a x86 emulator software to simulate Android OS on PC. It provides native user experience of Android OS, allows you to install, use and uninstall any Android application, just like physical Android device does.

How does Android Emulator work?

Android Emulator runs at desktop OS like Windows, Linux or Mac, but simulates a sandbox of Android OS. For better performance, most of modern Android Emulators takes the advantage of hardware virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V) to simulate multiple cores, just like physical Android device does.

From Android’s perspective, it can access “devices”, including CPU, memory, screen orientation, Rom, SD card, WiFi, battery, camera, GPS, accelerometer, etc, although they are all simulated by software.

From Windows’ perspective, Android Emulator is just a normal Windows application like notepad, all Android data are stored in several files in a certain Windows folder, for example, all stuff in SD card is likely a 10 GB file.